How to Play

The goal of the game is to complete the various objectives on your Pause Screen with the tools and manpower you have (or can find). Once the objectives are done, you can head for the exit vehicle and depart the battle-zone.

Your enemies are all the same, but how they attack you will be dependent on the weapon being used. Most small arms will be effective against infantry, but not so much against armored vehicles and tanks. For those, armor-piercing weapons are employed.

Defeated enemies drop their weapons, so if you happen to run out of ammunition and need something to defend yourself, you can help yourself to enemy weapons.

Your allies are your fireteam. The computer controlled fireteam will do their best to follow your orders, but human controlled soldiers will behave as their players will. All other NPC allied bots will go about their business, and will attempt to heal/revive you if needed (you may do the same for them).

F@$! Hardcore Difficulty -- Unlike Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising, there's no extra award for playing the game on the hardest difficulty level (Hardcore) which disables all your HUD-assist elements.

Because the game is faster paced and designed differently from the previous Operation Flashpoint games, it's a severe handicap to play without visual assistance. Don't make things hard for yourself — leave the HUD symbols and messages active.

Completing different missions will earn you a rating from no rating (no points) to gold (3 points). Basically, you want to earn more points by completing all the objectives in the mission, along with neutralizing as many enemies as possible during your jaunt.

Don't be discouraged with a poor, or inadequate, performance your first few times, as it takes time to improve your run through a level for a gold medal. As you earn points, allocate them to your player's set-up and your character will slowly speed up his actions, and improve his battle awareness.

Your personal soldier skills will improve the performance of your soldier regardless of his class. Unless you have some kinda see-through skeleton X-RAY vision from Silent Scope, you will want to increase the Tactical Awareness first. This way, you can spot enemies from afar and take them out early.

IGN suggests you increase the skills as follows (and this assumes you're retrying missions with the new set-up to earn gold medals).

Tactical Awareness - Enemies appear more often as red dots on the compass.

Each level earned in a soldier class, will unlock a B-MOD, weapon, gadget, S-MOD, or attachment for that class. The B and S MODS will grant you special abilities (such as experience gain, or more ammunition and grenades) while new weapons, gadgets, and attachments will give you a better combat experience.

When you earn a new level in a class, be sure to check out your newly earned perk. You will find that heavily modifying the class (for your character and that of the bots) to be beneficial.

XP Grinding like Operation Flashpoint JRPG -- Chances are you may finish the campaign long before you reach Level 20 in any (or all) of the soldier classes. Since the campaign missions are extremely long, you may want to use the Combat Sweep FTEs to level-grind your character.

If you are using the Combat Training (+10% XP) or Combat Veteran (+20% XP) B-MODs, clearing out all enemies, and destroying a good number of enemies and weapon caches, you will find yourself earning one new experience level each mission.

Unlike Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising, the constant presence of ammunition boxes in Red River means you can keep using your USMC weapons without needing to swap them for enemy weapons. You don't want to swap for enemy weapons (except in dire circumstances) anyway, since some of your B-MOD and S-MOD skills affect only USMC weapons.

There are essentially four types of ammunition bins and stockpiles: bullets, M203 rounds, hand grenades, and "other" (see below). Each box only replenishes the quantity of stuff it's supposed to, and nothing else. Note that the bins refill the stock of both UMSC and enemy weapons.

Bullets - this bin only replenishes the bullets in all weapons you are carrying. If you have a partial magazine, the refill will give you enough bullets (as an extra clip) to fully reload your mag.

Grenades - this bin restocks your M67 frag grenades. All other gadgets are limited in number, so deploy them only when the situation calls for it.

Other - this bin carries a specific weapon (M107, QW-2, Queen Bee, FGM Javelin, SMAW, F92 Stinger, etc.) and only stocks the ammunition of that weapon. Additionally, if you take something from the crate, you will replace one of your two weapons with that "special" weapon.